Just give it a good Thanksgiving push!

Thanksgiving came and went with little fanfare here in Honduras, though, inidentally, the only Thanksgiving email I received was from a Honduran amigo here in San Pedro. Anyway, Darrin (one of our country reps), Amanda and I spent Wednesday through Friday in the mountains of Danlí and Trojes visiting an MCC partner who helps subsitence coffee farmers diversify their crop load for when coffee prices drop. Getting up to the projects is a trip, but it's worth it.

First, a four-hour-bus ride from San Pedro Sula to Tegucigalpa, a one-and-a-half hour 4 X 4 truck ride to Danlí, a 2-hour car ride from Danlí to Trojes, and two more hours on muddy cliff-side roads out to the project site near the Nicarguan border. At one point I was pretty sure we weren't going to make it...


But we did, and were treated to some of the most amazing mountainscapes and charming farms I've seen.






These coffee farms tend to be built on steep sides of mountains, which present huge challenges in planting gardens. The MCC partner teaches farming techniques, such as using sugar cane, which has thick, deep roots, to help anchor the soil.




In the picture below, the farmer was drying his corn inside his living room because of the recent heavy rain.
We were greeted warmly by the families. At the first house we visited we enjoyed fresh sugar cane juice with a squeeze of sour orange. In the pictures below they are sending the sugar cane through the press.



While it was hard to know that my family was gathered around the turkey in Goshen on Thanskgiving Day, and I couldn't help but feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the chance to be in Central America, experiencing a very different way of life than I had in the US. And though Thanksgiving is not observed in Central America, a poor farm family invited us into their homes for a delicious feast of free-range chicken, potatoes, rice, and corn tortillas.

It was a very good Thanksgiving.